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Comment by michael1999 | Hacker News Reader

michael1999·

Before mass mechanization, we needed far more people to cut trees, mine nickel, or grow wheat. Now, we need far fewer people to do those things. But services like schools, banks, and hospitals have need certain levels of population to fund themselves and scale. These forces are the effects of capital, technology, and demographics, not will.

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It's many factors. However, the inability to create new cities and infrastructure can be overcome with will.

Now, whether we need new cities is a separate question.

In Canada where taxation and housing is expensive, the complaint has been that fertile landed is being used for urban sprawl.

One potential solution, that's rarely discussed, is to build cities in the North adjacent to large bodies of water. With access to shipping routes, lower taxation and superior infrastructure to make up for the adverse affects of weather.

You may argue the economic incentives and capital aren't there. I'd argue there's a massive misallocation of capital and the economy is fundamentally broken, but that'd be a lengthy discussion.

How to do you have lower taxation when your costs (heating, food, labour, transportation, construction materials) are all higher? The north doesn't even have permanent roads, and building those would cost billions of dollars and zillions every year as the frost destroys them. Ask the Soviet Union if profitably settling the north is a mere matter of will.

The easy way is to provide dirty water, shabby schools, and expensive food, but we do that already and people aren't exactly flocking north.

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